Shoot the Interpreter: Reflections on the role of political interpreters as soft power tools

Abstract

Language not only plays an important role in shaping the way we see reality, it can also be instrumental in spreading a precise power narrative, conveying a specific ideology, or framing a certain political figure in a way that enables a particular discourse to permeate throughout societies. The exercise of power through language is a multifaceted topic of debate that can be explored from many perspectives, but the present proposal will focus on an actor that more often than not goes unnoticed in the political and diplomatic arena, in spite of its importance in multilingual contexts: the interpreter. Interpreters performance as intercultural and interlinguistic mediators is key to the successful dissemination of political ideas in bi- or multicultural communicative events. Therefore, they might play an important role as tools for the more powerful political actors to exert soft power persuading others to do what they want without force or coercion (as per Nye s original definition, 1990) or what Bourdieu (1991, p. 170) would call symbolic power . This presentation offers some reflections on the implications that the figure of the interpreter may have in political and diplomatic contexts by taking some core ideas of Critical Discourse Analysis as a point of departure, in particular, the complex dynamics between power, discourse, ideology, and language in the process of building mental representations and models. Reflections will revolve around the three strategic functions identified by Chilton and Schäffner (2006, pp. 311-312) in political discourse, namely: coercion and resistance, legitimization and delegitimization, and representation and misrepresentation. The implications of such functions will be discussed drawing on the issue of role in interpreting studies, in order to try to establish a methodology for further studying interpreter-mediated communicative events from this perspective.